Nicknaming the Higgs boson "the God particle" was a brilliant move, because it made it almost unforgettable without adding anything at all to our understanding. And journalists love it – what is journalism for, if not to spread a film of smug misunderstanding across almost everything it touches?

Quite possibly, without the name, the scientists might never have raised the funds to find the particle, as they seem to have done. And that in itself is a good thing. I'm all for knowledge, and the more apparently useless the more interesting it becomes.

I don't pretend to understand how the God particle influences the standard scientific understandings of physics, even if I can parrot the verbal formulae well enough: it adds mass to particles which otherwise ought not to have any in our present theories, even though measurements show quite clearly that they do. But though I can say that, I have no idea of how to think about it, or how to relate any particular measurement to the scheme.

This isn't an arts graduate point; there are other fields of science – gross physics, chemistry, perhaps, and evolutionary biology – that I do understand in the sense that I have a clear mental model of the kinds of things they deal with and the kinds of interactions these might have. But I don't have any coherent idea of what a fundamental particle is like.

We are told often enough that fundamental particles are not like anything we can imagine, and I am sure it's true. But the one thing that the God particle shows is that we can only think of it as like other things – and it isn't like any of them. Something of the same, of course, is true of God. But the incomprehensibility of theology and the incomprehensibility of science are different. For one thing, God can – we're told – be felt but not mathematically modelled, whereas fundamental particles are the other way round.

But efforts to think what the God particle might be like are illuminating in themselves, because they tell us what sort of knowledge most people really want from the universe. And this knowledge is an answer to the child's question "why?", which in some ways science cannot answer. I want to be careful here, because it's obvious that there are many "why?" questions that science can answer, and the slogan that it can only do "how" while religion or philosophy do "why" is confusing at best, and often simply wrong.

Much of the publicity around the search for the Higgs boson suggests that it can help us better understand what the universe is for. That seems to me entirely wrong, for the same kind of reasons that intelligent design is misconceived: a God who left his fingerprints very well hidden in the universe would be entirely comprehensible, but only as a kind of cosmic sadist.

For the same kind of reason, it is wrong to suppose that finding the Higgs boson disproves the God hypothesis. I really wouldn't want my Christian friends to worship a God so stupid that Richard Dawkins could outsmart him, and I don't believe they do.

But when the reporter on Newsnight, said: "We don't really know why everything around us exists, why the universe has form, why objects have mass. The fundamental question about why we're here remains unanswered … today's announcement could change all of that", her words gain their force from the ambiguity of these repeated "why"s.

Aristotle's division of four causes doesn't map very tidily here. I think that the great division is between the kind of explanation required to explain the behaviour of living things and those that are required to explain the behaviour of non-living ones. It's very likely that we think much more about the behaviour of living beings than non-living ones, and that this knowledge is more carefully transmitted through generations: that would explain why Greek tragedy has not been superseded, and Greek science has.

In this light, a "why?" question automatically makes us think of purpose before material causes. So the wholly material, or at least mathematical, explanations emerging from the particle accelerator at Cern are unconsciously lashed into a framework of purposive explanations, and astrologers continue to make far more money than astronomers.

It will take more than a perfect model of the universe to change that fact.